The gay agenda

I’m a libertarian and a child of San Francisco in the 1970s. What this means is that I believe, very strongly, that people should be allowed to engage in same sex relationships. I also believe that people who are homosexual (and any subset of that, such as lesbian, bisexual, etc.), should not be harassed or discriminated against.

The 1990s and the 21st century, however, have seen something entirely different from the drive to tolerance and individual freedom that I support. Gay-ness has become part of a larger political agenda that has nothing to do with an individual’s sexuality, and everything to do with breaking down traditional American morality. This morality is not just window-dressing. It is the nation’s backbone.

A Reluctant Scribe, who happened to be near ground zero as gay activists expanded their range beyond merely freeing themselves from discrimination and repression, guest posts at Brutally Honest with an insight into the enormous political agenda that underlies the formerly sympathetic gay rights movement.

I would suggest that it’s because the family stands as a bulwark against the state. This is a Leftist movement, and the destruction of the family is an important part of the ability to create a dominant government.

What’s really silly about the way gays have allowed themselves to be co-opted in this battle is that statist governments have always been fanatically anti-homosexual. Whether Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, gays have been horribly maltreated when the socialist government is in charge.

Divided loyalties. So long as you have a care provider outside or external from the state, the state’s control over you is weak or at least changeable. If the state is your only protector and source of surcease, then you will have nowhere to go, to turn to for alternatives if you don’t like the status quo. You would be forced into overthrowing the state, which is much harder than simply a person choosing another way of getting what they want, through black market or other such.

Totalitarian societies control crime by co-opting crime. Replacing the source of crime, with the source of totalitarian ideology and followers. In a free society, crime is suppressed by the people. In a half way society that is sort of repressive and sort of free, or at least pretends it is free, then you have half government repression, half criminal networks. A sort of pseudo or light totalitarianism from the state isn’t enough to co-opt crime, nor does it promote vigilance amongst the people. Crime isn’t replaced by Marxist secret police or thought enforcers, nor are the people empowered to end crime themselves via security apparatuses.

A democratic socialist system is the most unstable of all. Not quite totalitarian enough in their economic and philosophy to grab people’s attention, but not free enough to be sustainable in terms of economic or civics.

Humans beings are selfish animals that seek survival through personal gain. There are many mechanisms for such. Religion teaches a supernatural or post-death solution. You do something in the real world, and get rewarded in the next. Other mechanisms teach things like Original Sin, like Original Racism. Capitalism harnesses people’s greed for societal benefits. Socialism and Communism harnesses people’s greed to empower bureaucrats and elected officials with the power of life and death in distributing wealth.

For those that are already socially dysfunctional, who cannot contribute or co-exist in this environment, they can hitch their cart to a rising star. If that rising star is the government, then it is plain to see how they would benefit from destroying anything that would oppose government power.

Charles Martel

If you want a preview of life for gays under U.S. socialism, take a look at The One’s palpable discomfort with the whole issue of gayness. Obama is a guy who doesn’t really like sex—few narcissists have the energy for it. Add to that the ick factor and you can see why the gay lifestyle turns him off.

Militant gays are starting to clue into that, but I don’t see any wholesale defections on their part. The intellectual firepower just isn’t there—and probably never will be considering their fanatical application of the wrong organ to the perception of nearly everything.

BrianE

If I understand your position regarding homosexuality BW, you are tolerant of the principal of homosexuality, but hope your children don’t become gay, since the gay lifestyle is subject to so many problems (depression, disease, etc).
If you hope your children aren’t homosexual, but would love them if they were, isn’t it consistent that you would hope other children aren’t homosexual, and in fact wouldn’t you wish that no one were homosexual given the problems they face?
I suspect at some level, homosexuals are convinced if everyone in society that speaks ill of the homosexual lifestyle were to vanish from the face of the earth, all of the struggles they face would also disappear.
My opposition to homosexuality is based on the understanding that it violates God’s will. While your hope for your children is based on more practical considerations (leaving aside the argument that God may oppose homosexuality for many of the same reasons you do), what is the functional difference to our positions?
I view it that you have put an asterick beside your support of homosexuality (I’m in favor of it, except when it comes to my children).
Wouldn’t it make sense that to the homosexual activist, true acceptance of homosexuality can’t be achieved until people like you are also silenced, and homosexuality is viewed as equal or superior to heterosexuality, since all the baggage of commitment and monogamy have been removed, allowing all of us to express our sexuality freely and without judgment?
Don’t get me wrong, I hope my children don’t practice homosexuality for the same reasons you do in addition to the knowledge it violates God’s plan for us (as does fornication, adultery, greed, gossip and many other afflictions common to humans).
While your position may be tolerated at this point in time, I suspect it won’t be when it represents the final barrier to the ultimate goal of the homosexual activist—who by the way aren’t that much different from the socialist or communist or any other ist that believes we can perfect humans through re-education.

My problem, BrianE, is that I strongly believe that homosexuality is a genuine biological phenomenon. There are people who are born gay. Otherwise, why would people have lived out those impulses in oppressive regimes that responded to homosexuality with death, imprisonment or torture? That’s why I’m willing to respond reasonably if someone is gay.

I also believe, though, that human beings are sexual animals, and that sexuality can be manipulated. People like physical pleasure. If you can sell them on a fuller agenda of sexual pleasure, many will go for it — especially if traditional morality no longer exists to say that heterosexuality is the preferred outlet for human sexual impulses.

That’s why I can love a child who is gay, or be tolerant of a gay person, while at the same time deeply opposing a political agenda that seeks to sexualize an entire society, making appropriate behavior out something that actually comes naturally only to a small percentage of the population.

jjteam

What if…

The strength of American families was a…Christian strength?

Different cultural families have different strengths. Jewish families have a tradition of education and boundaries against Gentiles. Islamic families are male-dominated and extremely hierarchical. Asian families are “one for all and all for one” generational families.

The American family is under extreme pressure, as is Christianity itself. Churches are emptier and emptier as the hedonistic delights of moral relativism take hold. How do you guide your youngsters to what was a previously constrained adulthood, of responsibility and honor? Secular World doesn’t have much use for any such principles.

I asked my brilliant husband once – why, did he think, the media was so beholden to this massive deception (hedonism, AGW, gayness, liberations) and he thought for a minute and said – “I think they want to reject the classic movements towards Armageddon, to overturn any traditional religious influence in favor of a more antiseptic path.”

All of today’s untruths are specifically targeted to Christianity, IMHO. Look at Dawkins, Hitchens and the new atheists who stand at the chasm between our Judeo-Christian infrastructure and the craziness of tomorrow. They jump through endless philosophical hoops to defend – “reason”. But every argument rings hollow. This is an assault on any and all religions, but Christianity at the forefront. Heaven help us…JessM

If you hope your children aren’t homosexual, but would love them if they were, isn’t it consistent that you would hope other children aren’t homosexual, and in fact wouldn’t you wish that no one were homosexual given the problems they face?

The context is invalid.

Book here dislikes homosexual lifestyle because of the risk. Remove the risk, remove the aversion. Book doesn’t prefer people to be in that lifestyle because it is risky, not because people are in that lifestyle. Remove the risk, remove the preference against.

Thus if gays want acceptance of lifestyle, they should just remove the debilitating effects of that lifestyle from existence. But they don’t. Because it’s a method to control people. So long as gays are disturbed, troubled, feeling oppressed, and with a sack full of resentment, you can control them. That’s a good thing for puppet masters.

expat

One sentence of Reluctant Scribe’s stood out for me: that the gay education activists didn’t give a rat’s **s about the children. I have no doubt that gays have trouble accepting their own sexuality, especially in adolescence, but then all adolescents have trouble figuring out who they are. What about the less than beautiful and the not too bright? I see many gay activists as being stuck in their own little self-centered world and blaming others for their inability to partake of the larger one.

excathedra

I came to terms with my homosexual orientation in my late 20’s and have lived three decades as an “out” gay man. I have gone through a variety of different attitudes toward both my own sexuality and to the other people who, in some sense, share it. Like the bnai Israel whose single question was, “Is it good for the Jews?”, my solidarity with other gays was once very tribal and oppositional. Over the last several years, my sense of primary group allegiance has expanded to larger realms, as, for example, an American, a man and a Westerner.

I understand and respect the religious strictures against sex outside marriage. They represent long human experience and generally make a lot of sense. But since they would have condemned me to a life without any sexual contact at all, and more importantly, any possibility of embodied love with another person, I chose myself over those traditions. I do not regret that choice at all. And if I do have regrets about my sexual behavior, they are based in my flaws as a human, not as a homosexual.

But I do find myself in somewhat uncomfortable agreement with those of you who resist the “gay agenda”. There is no necessary connection between a primary erotic attraction to your own gender and the leftist/progressive goal of deconstructing all forms of traditional Western culture. But those connections in fact dominate the shape of the gay identity. On my own blog, I have pinpointed what I believe is actually wrong about homosexuality: its accidental but very real captivity to and support of this culturally Marxist project, especially its hatred of manhood. Many gays would honestly deny that this is true, but I am afraid that they are simply not seeing clearly.

The gay identity, as it has been put together over the last forty years, prescribes resentful group victimism, an ironically anti-male feminism and a support of leftist politics. To be a gay Republican, for example, is seen as simple self-hatred, as if a black joined the Klan.

As a psychologist of the Jungian persuasion, I am alert to archetypal shadows and the enantiodromian process whereby extremes become their opposites. And within each poor victim lies a ruthless tyrant, one whose blind zest for oppressing comes from a sense of unassailable moral privilege created by previous suffering.

This dynamic is not absent in the gay community. Once we wished to left in peace to live our lives without fear of violence or incarceration. Now we too often wish to recreate the world, by use of cultural intimidation and legal force, so that it is convenient for us, regardless of what it costs others.

I remain deeply and happily homosexual but I am not a victim, I honor masculinity and as a political conservative, reject the statist collectivism of the Left.

This makes me a minority within my own demographic, where same-sex marriage, an idea that seems to me to be about ten minutes old, has achieved the overnight status of a fundamental human right. Although I would like folks like me to have some kind of legal partnership, I am afraid that to render the sex of spouses irrelevant makes the number also irrelevant and then makes superfluous the very idea of marriage as anything other than a contract for public benefits and status. In short, it means the eventual destruction of marriage.

That will be attempted not out of overt hatred but in order to make it “open”, “non-discriminatory”, “multiculturally sensitive” and hospitable to all the other Trojan horses that progressivism uses in order to bring about its utopian dream.

The gay agenda is problematic because it is a subset of the progressive agenda.

Thank you, excathedra, for that insight. I imagine you feel as uncomfortable politically as Jews do when they look at modern Judaism, which seems like a branch of the Democratic party, or equity feminists, who are horrified by the way in which a movement dedicated to liberating women has become part of the extreme branch of the Progressive movement. The same holds true, of course, in the race area, which also sees race as a cudgel in the Progressive movement. In other words, Leftism co-opts and then taints any movement dedicated to liberty. Very disturbing that.

suek

>>In other words, Leftism co-opts and then taints any movement dedicated to liberty. Very disturbing that.>>

Yes…any politically activist movement is likely to be infiltrated by the leftists and perverted to their agenda. If there is a group they can identify, isolate and organize, they do so and direct it to their purpose. Hence, Community Organizer.

Sort of like a parasitic Borg. Or… there was another sci-fi series…StarGate? That had a parasite that couldn’t exist outside of a body, so it entered the body and virtually eliminated the body’s personality so that it could achieve it’s end.

I agree with your prediction that the “eventual destruction of marriage…will be attempted not out of overt hatred but in order to make it “open”, “non-discriminatory”, “multiculturally sensitive” and hospitable to all the other Trojan horses that progressivism uses in order to bring about its utopian dream” and that “the gay agenda is problematic because it is a subset of the progressive agenda”.

As it happens, I came across a corroborating article at n+1 magazine by Mark Greif, entitled “On Repressive Sentimentalism” — the allusion to Marcuse alone was enough to raise my hackles:

Nevertheless, it is an intellectually honest — and horrifically wrong, in my opinion–account of why the (gay) progressive movement argues for the destruction of the family. An excerpt:

******************
(Beginning of excerpt)
Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices.

The utopians among us held our peace. It seemed impossible to stay in view of the rest of traditional society, the reactionary and hostile parts, and make our argument to fellow progressives that gay reorganization might be better than the old heterosexuality, and not just a neutral object for tolerance—that liberation from the heterosexual family was something we all could wish for, and that it needn’t stop where it has.

(snip)

Social utopianism has long focused on the reorganization of households, but has rarely accomplished much. Straight utopians argued for free love, free divorce, unorthodox childrearing and communal parenthood, and got divorce, followed by more imprisoning marriages, followed by more divorce. Because the home has seemed to be at the origin of economics (the word comes from the Greek oikos, household, and household management, oikonomia), a revision of the home, say one based on non-reproductivity and made by equals of the same sex, could ground a wider egalitarianism. Because the family, as the crucible of personality for children, seems to be the origin of violence, hierarchy, and tyranny—in the old descending triad of dominance: man-woman-child—a revision of the family, such that children could look forward to forming their own future households on different models, could gain new principles of power for society.

(End of excerpt)
******************

I can only close with a great quote by GK Chesterton: “This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.”

BrianE

At least he doesn’t sugarcoat it.

Same-sex marriage and the minimalist defense of abortion are both tactically sound for now. But the strain one begins to feel in public discussions is that people of good sense are being compromised by sentimental rhetoric originally adopted to convince bigots. Sentimentalization may be effective in a Hallmark regime, but it’s a bummer at home. Around the kitchen table, we ought to speak plainly. The goal of gay marriage, in the pro-marriage position, has to include indifference to marriage as an institution. Marriage must remain abstract—it hardly matters if anyone does it once the original blush is off and the initial rush abates. But the point of abortion rights, in the “pro-choice” position, should truly be abortions. Abortions need to occur concretely, readily, until the day contraception is magically universal and perfect; the idea that they’re inevitably tragic is just false.

BrianE

Whoops,
That quote is from the link gpc31 provided.

suek

This discussion brings back one of those little tidbits that remains stuck in my brain for no particular reason:

Somewhere, sometime, there was an experiment or a study done on rats. They were placed in a limited area, and simply observed. They multiplied and multiplied. Eventually they overpopulated the area (now I’m wondering if the food supply was regulated somehow), and problems developed, with gangs of males attacking individual rats, multiple matings of females, and killing and eating the newly born rats. Pregnancies became less frequent – in spite of the matings – and eventually the population stabilized. I don’t know what happened after that…no memory…I think that’s as far as we went. The point of the narration, as I recall, was that population pressures will affect ferility. In fact, what has stuck in my mind was not the fertility issue, but the behavior issues. It seems so similar to what happens in our cities today. I don’t recall any mention made about the male rats mating with other males, but with a reduced fertility – now I’m wondering. It seems to me that the assumption at the time was that the reduced fertility was the response to stress.

Sure, but let’s not call it breeding, eh? The term ‘breed’ implies reproduction and a next generation, which you can never get by same-sex intercourse.

As for overpopulation… there’s no such thing. There’s plenty of space for everyone and then some. Human beings are the only creatures in the universe that remodel the environment to suit their needs, regardless of what that environment looks like. You may think that beavers do the same thing, but put beavers in the middle of the savannah and see what happens. Whereas Man… ah, put us in the Sahara, we’ll be alright more or less; transplant us to the Arctic, and we’ll also do fine, more or less.

Jack Haldeman’s plenty okay, but if you bought into his story, then you’ll have to buy into the notion that homosexuality is neither genetic nor congenital, but mostly learned behaviour.

Something I never did understand, though. Why is it that only homosexuality is treated this way? I mean, there are babies born drug-addicted, there’s some fairly good studies that suggest alcoholism and obesity are in some cases also genetic or congenital traits. And yet nobody ever says that this is just an alternative lifestyle, they have every right to indulge, it’s not their fault…